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Saturday 1 April 2023
Welcome to the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, Fourth Edition. Some sample entries appear below. Click here for the Introduction; here for the masthead; here for Acknowledgments; here for the FAQ; here for advice on citations. Find entries via the search box above (more details here) or browse the menu categories in the grey bar at the top of this page.
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Thomas, D M
(1935-2023) UK poet and author who made use of sf themes most explicitly in such early Poetry as "The Head-Rape" in New Worlds for March 1968 and the two-part "Computer 70: Dreams & Lovepoems" (March-April 1970 New Worlds), a sequence assembled with other poetry of interest in Logan Stone (coll 1970); or the later "S. F." (in The Umbral Anthology of Science Fiction Poetry, anth ...
Goodman, Dickie
(1934-1989) US record producer who with his aspiring songwriter friend Bill Buchanan (1930-1996) launched both their careers with the comic novelty record "The Flying Saucer Parts 1 and 2" (1956). Inspired by Orson Welles's radio broadcast War of the Worlds (1938), it is credited with being the first record to use the "break-in" technique, which evolved into modern-day sampling. Buchanan and Goodman ...
Roth, Veronica
(1988- ) US author whose Young Adult Dystopian Divergent sequence beginning with Divergent (2011) is set in a Near Future Chicago whose population has been divided into five "factions"; the young protagonist discovers on being tested that she is a Divergent, and therefore eligible to join more than one group. Her progress upwards through the ranks of the ...
Car Wars
Board and counter Wargame (1981). Steve Jackson Games (SJG). Designed by Steve Jackson, Chad Irby. / Car Wars is a game of "autoduelling" – combat between armed and armoured cars, motorcycles and trucks. It is set in a fragmented future America, in which oil and food crises have caused the near collapse of civilization. The game's Future History exemplifies many of the ...
Innes, Hammond
(1913-1998) UK journalist and author of adventure novels whose protagonists are usually pitted against the natural elements, which are intensely imagined, as in his most famous title, The "Mary Deare" (1956); his later fiction tends to focus mostly on wildlife and the environment as a whole, in defence of both. He wrote nonfantastic children's adventure tales as by Ralph Hammond. Some of his early works contain fantastic elements, The Doppelganger (1936), his first ...
Nicholls, Peter
(1939-2018) Australian editor and author, primarily a critic and historian of sf through his creation and editing of The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction [see below]; resident in the UK 1970-1988, in Australia from 1988; worked as an academic in English literature (1962-1968, 1971-1977), scripted television documentaries, was a Harkness Fellow in Film-making (1968-1970) in the USA, worked as a publisher's editor (1982-1983), often broadcast film and book reviews on BBC Radio from 1974 and ...